Diverging Models of Participatory Governance: A Framework for … · 2018-05-01 · Diverging...
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Diverging Models of Participatory Governance:
A Framework for Comparison
Carolina Johnson
Department of Political Science, University of Washington, Seattle
March 29, 2013
Paper prepared for presentation at the
2013 Western Political Science Association Meeting
Hollywood, CA
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Participatory governance (PG), the state-sanctioned direct engagement of the public in
policy decision-making, has become increasingly widespread. As of 2008, over 100 different
cities in Europe had decided to allow citizens to directly allocate significant portions of the
cities’ budgets (Sintomer et al 2008), while conservative estimates suggest that in Brazil alone 2
billion dollars of public money is being allocated through participatory processes (APSA 2012).
Provincial governments in British Columbia and Ontario tied their hands and allowed the general
public to design, propose, and ultimately vote on extensive reforms to the provincial electoral
system. City planners from Europe fly to conferences in Brazil and India to learn new ways of
decentralizing decisions at the community level. In the face of economic collapse and loss of
confidence in government, Iceland embarked on a process of rewriting its constitution that
embedded several different avenues for direct citizen participation in the shaping of priorities
and proposals for a new constitution. These developments have been built on the dedication of
millions of dollars in public and private money as well as the time and political capital of many
policy-makers and civil society activists.
The expansion of participatory governance has been propelled by a wide range of
positive outcomes ascribed to these reforms, including improved accountability, stronger norms
of citizenship and a more civic-minded public, a more densely connected and more effective
civil society, increased voter turnout and more legitimate government. With the ensuing increase
in on the ground experimentation and innovation in approaches to participatory governance, it
has become clear that there is substantial and systematic variation in the structure of participatory
governance. One major pattern in this variation is the emergence of two general 'bundles' of
institutional design: one which seems to more closely tied to deliberative traditions in democratic
theory and another which seems more committed to standards articulated by participatory, what I
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refer to as Assembly and Community models of participatory governance, respectively. In this
paper, I argue that the substantive democratic outcomes from PG are likely to vary across the
participatory and deliberative approaches in predicable and important ways related to the
normative commitments embedded in the institutional design. Recognizing that different
outcomes are implicated by each approach can help to make sense of the wide-ranging and often
inconsistent field of research on the outcomes participatory governance in general. The
theoretical framework I articulate here is important as it provides a basis for the comparative
development of empirical study of participatory, which has been dominated by exemplary case
studies or limited evaluation of within country variation in implementation of a single
institutional reform.
In this paper, I begin with an introduction to participatory governance in general,
describing both the emerging consensus and continued diversity in scholarly and practical work.
Next, I briefly review the contrasting priorities of participatory and deliberative theorists of
democracy, and map these differences onto directions for empirical research. I then draw out the
distinction between deliberative and participatory perspectives as it applies to the observed
patterns in the development of participatory governance institutions. Finally, I offer a series of
specific and divergent expectations for outcomes from the Community and Assembly models of
PG that can help provide a basis for future comparative empirical evaluations of PG reforms.
Introducing participatory governance
Participatory governance can be defined as the formal extension of public voice into
political decision-making beyond the ballot box, “the devolution of decision-making authority to
state-sanctioned policy-making venues jointly controlled by citizens and government officials”
(Wampler 2012b: 669). PG innovations are designed to complement, rather than to replace, the
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traditional representative institutions of liberal democracy. They emphasize institutional
solutions, characterized by the development of formal rule structures incorporating the public
decisions into the policy process. Outside the PG process, the public may have ample
opportunity for expression or even influence: through lobbying, protest, singing, or participating
in limited opportunities for public comment. PG is distinctive by introducing rules formally
reserving opportunities for public control of decision-making.
Participatory governance shares roots with direct democracy, but should be distinguished
empirically. Direct democracy is generally understood to refer to initiative and referendum
processes or New England town meetings, in which unmediated public control takes the place of
representative government. Institutions of direct democracy such as referenda may be integrated
with participatory governance, for example in the use of referenda to decide whether the new
provincial voting systems proposed by the Citizens’ Assemblies for Electoral Reform in British
Columbia and Ontario should be implemented in law. Participatory governance refers to a
distinct approach to incorporating public voice in the formulation of law and policy and, often, in
the oversight of its implementation, in conjunction with existing representative institutions.
How is participatory governance distinct from the widespread municipal practices of
‘consultation’, public comment periods, and much-derided public meetings? The key difference
is in the extent of the public’s authority. In a classic article building on evaluations of federal
social programs in the 1960s, Arnstein (1969) introduces a helpful framework to think about the
authority citizens have in a participation process: an eight-rung “ladder of participation,” which
describes a spectrum of citizen participation from “manipulation” and “therapy” (lowest levels of
citizen power) to “delegated power” and “citizen control” (highest level). Common existing
consultation and public meeting processes would fall under the middle sections of this spectrum,
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informing and possibly even collecting input from the public, but not assuring public control
over the agenda, policy proposals, or decision-making. Participatory governance as outlined
here includes processes that would fall under the two highest levels, in which the public has
control over agenda-setting, decision-making, and/or implementation. What this looks like,
practically, can take numerous forms, but in their ideal type PG processes provide for the public
generation of priorities and problems as well as a range of possible solutions and ultimately
public decisions about the final policy approach. Such public control over policy has been
implemented in a range of policy areas, from budgeting and strategic planning, to healthcare and
social issues, and to constitutional and electoral reforms.
This expansion of new opportunities for public participation in decision-making has not
occurred in a vacuum. The increased attention to the role of popular voice and vote in decision-
making has coincided with broader debates about the role of civil society participation in
democratic consolidation and maintenance (Diamond 1999; Putnam 1993; Cohen and Arato
1992), the importance of building broadly accountable and/or deliberative political societies
(Habermas 1989; Gutman and Thompson 2004; Gastil 2008), the role of decentralization in
development (Conyers 1984; Craig and Porter 2006), and the ominous threat of democratic
decline in advanced democracies (Macedo et al 2005; Norris 1999, 2011; Putnam 2000). While
connected to these broadly overarching debates, the role of direct citizen participation in
governing offers distinct theoretical and empirical concerns. Participatory governance is
characterized by distinct practices and rules, actors are ordinary citizens rather than (sometimes
as well as) political elites, engaged in collective decision-making activities determining public
service or political outcomes in their communities. This type of civic participation directs
attention to participation at the interface of the public and the state and the explicit creation of a
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point of interaction distinct and additional to any opportunities for representation of public voice
through the ballot box or advocacy campaign or contentious politics. Significantly, these new
institutions represent the formation of an extended interface between citizens and the state, and
are neither a development of civil society distinct from the state, nor simply as a form of
devolution or decentralization to smaller units of political authority.
The expansion of participatory governance has also produced a relatively coherent and
distinct field of study and practice, anchored by professional networks and collaborations (such
as the IAP2, NCDD, DDC, Involve, Kettering Foundation, and the Ash Center for Democratic
Innovation at Harvard) and seminal texts (e.g. Abers 2000; Fung and Wright 2003; Baiocchi
2005; Smith 2009). The emerging consensus around the stories of canonical cases has served as
a focal point for scholarly research and the development of principles of best practices (building
especially on existing typologies of participation such as Arnstein's ladder participation).
Approaches to PG exemplified by these canonical cases are presented as models, reworked into
toolkits, and actively advocated. Nevertheless, as implementation expands into new settings and
resolves itself more clearly, there is an increasing need for better comparative analysis and
understanding of the implications of variation in the PG models. There is a shared conviction
that expanding public participation in governance, if done with genuine cooperation and buy-in
by political and government actors, can have a real effect reinvigorating democracy and
improving the quality of government.
Complicating consensus: diverse institutions and mixed result
While I can point to the emergence of an increasingly well-consolidated community of
practice and scholarly works, the label participatory governance in fact encompasses a diverse
range of processes. For example, two of the most commonly cited PG processes are the British
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Columbia Citizens’ Assembly for Electoral Reform and Participatory Budgeting, as originated in
Porto Alegre in Brazil. In the former, a group of 100 citizens selected by a stratified random
sampling approach designed to be broadly representative of the province met over the course of
several months to learn and deliberate about electoral rules in order to construct a proposal for a
package of reforms to the electoral rules in the province that was put to the public vote in a
referendum.1 In contrast, in the latter, a self-selected (or mobilized by community organizations)
group of citizens come together in a series of widely open and inclusive neighborhood meetings
where priorities for the city budget are articulated and delegated to committees of members of
the community who agree to dedicate considerable amounts of time to refining proposals to be
voted on by the city/neighborhood generally, reporting back to their neighborhood throughout
the process. These archetypes fall clearly into a common framework of participatory
governance, with direct decision-making by members of the general public rather than elected
officials or government staff. Nevertheless, they also demonstrate diverse institutional
arrangements and varied priorities of approach and outcome. Within the community of PG
scholarship, there has been limited research how these choices in the design of these institutions
actually matter.
This is not to say that there has been no discussion of how participatory governance in
general matters. Scholars and advocates of PG have attributed a range of positive outcomes to
PG. Such outcomes have included greater legitimacy of government or a decreased “democratic
deficit” (Norris 2011), greater transparency, more equitable distributional outcomes, increased
political efficacy at the individual level, and a stronger, more effective civil society (or, in other
words, a more ‘civic’ culture). Not only does research on how these innovations matter present
1 The package of reforms narrowly failed to meet the standard of a 60% necessary for implementation, but it did reach a solid majority of support at 58% (Warren and Pearse 2008).
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varied results across a wide range of outcomes all identified as measures of success, but even
within the research focusing on each more narrow outcome, evidence is often mixed. There may
be a rough consensus on what PG looks like, but the actual record of evidence for its outcomes is
less clear. Ultimately, I will argue that the ambivalence in the existing empirical work on PG a
reflection of the variation of processes along a spectrum from an emphasis on more ideally
participatory vs. more ideally deliberative. Here, I briefly consider the scope of the research on
effects from PG in several key outcome areas.
Regarding effects on civil society, different studies have demonstrated a range of results
from PG actively catalyzing civic activity to PG having little effect and being dependent on
already-mobilized civic actors. Baiocchi, Heller and Silva (2011) show that PG can support the
transformation of civil society activity from clientelist to formalized relations with the state, but
at the same time that PG does not actually enable stronger autonomous mobilization of civil. In
contrast, Wampler (2012a) offers evidence that participatory budgeting across Brazil encouraged
direct negotiation and alliance-building between civil society organizations and Akkerman et al
(2004) show that introducing a more participatory “interactive state” encourages the bridging
social capital by strengthening overlapping organizational networks. In yet a further contrast,
earlier work by Wampler (2007) shows that successful implementation of participatory
budgeting in Brazil is actually dependent on a pre-existing well-mobilized civil society.
Looking at PG’s impact on political efficacy and voter behavior, results have been more
consistent, but have possibly limited external validity due to the conditions under which effects
are observed. In both experimental settings (Morrell 2005) and high-intensity, highly structured
forums (Nabatchi 2007, 2010; Gastil et al 2010; Gastil and Xenos 2010; Gastil and Dillard 1999)
experiences with facilitated deliberation have been associated with increases in both internal and
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external evaluations of political efficacy by participants. Moving into research in more realistic
conditions, Knobloch and Gastil (2012) find that general public awareness of a deliberative
public decision-making event (the Oregon Citizens Initiative Review) increases external political
efficacy while Docherty et al (2008) offer some further general evidence that in communities
where participatory processes are implemented see higher levels of reported efficacy
(ambiguously defined). Negative results have not been commonly reported, but efficacy in the
larger community has not been a primary outcome for evaluations of many real world
participatory processes.
In terms of accountability and trust in government, evidence is harder to pin down. Speer
2011 uses fuzzy set QCA on case studies of participatory planning in Guatemala to establish that
participatory governance mechanisms can enhance accountability when combined with electoral
mechanisms, and that this operates primarily through increasing voters' information about
government performance. Brinkerhoff and Azfar (2006) review a number of studies and
conclude that "community empowerment" can strengthen accountability and responsiveness in a
context of decentralization. Plenty of single case studies and anecdotal describe feelings of
greater accountability or trust, but it has been less well established in a social-scientific approach.
Finally, the responses to big questions of redistribution and equity from PG are as
uncertain as those of effects on civil society and mobilization: A significant chunk of research
has claimed that processes like participatory budgeting increase pro-poor investment and lower
poverty rates, or at least quality of life of the poor (World Bank 2008, Avritzer 2010, Donaghy
2011). However, when Boulding and Wampler directly investigate measurable outcomes in
communities with PB, they find that overall measurable outcomes of well-being are largely
unchanged.
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In each of these studies, researchers have used either single case studies or, at most,
comparisons within a single model of PG within a single country. We can learn a great deal
about how PG works in each case from these works, but have not yet really begun to engage with
explanations of why we see this variation in outcome. Might the actual variation in the design of
the PG process matter for the outcomes we see?
Deliberative and participatory democracies
Taking a step back, it seems reasonable to expect that observed democratic outcomes
may vary with the design of the participatory institutions. The development of participatory
governance has been building (often quite explicitly) on well-established traditions in democratic
theory. On the one hand, PG has drawn from traditions of participatory democracy, with its
common emphasis on enabling the general public to be directly responsible for agenda-setting
and decision making as both an educative and an empowering process, in combination with a
concern for maximizing the inclusiveness and openness of a process. On the other hand, most
PG institutions additionally try to embed norms and practices from deliberative democracy,
setting aside space for deliberative exchange, with the collection of evidence and information
and the articulation of positions and reasoned justifications for those positions. PG innovations
are often trying to improve the breadth and depth of public participation in policy making as well
as the quality of both the decision process and the policy outcome.
While PG advocates have liberally drawn from both traditions, political theorists have
nevertheless long recognized tensions between the normative priorities of deliberative and
participatory democrats.2 This is an extensive, wide-ranging literature, for which I will not
provide yet another fully comprehensive review (for good examples of these, see Hauptmann 2 For foundational works in participatory democracy, see Pateman 1970 and Barber 1984; for deliberative democracy see Habermas 1989, Warren 1996, and Gutmann and Thompson 1996 and 2004.
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2001 or Bohman 1998). However, to outline the distinctions salient to this project, a core
tension can be identified in the prioritization of inclusion and learning by the participatory
democrats in contrast to the emphasis on reasoned justification in aid of mutual understanding
and orientation to the collective good by deliberative democrats.
One classic critique of deliberation raises serious concerns that the association of
deliberation with rationality and, often, a particularly Habermasian ideal of the public sphere
excludes subaltern publics and those who are not equipped with the time, informational, or
linguistic resources to participate in idealized rational discourse (Sanders 1997; Young 1990,
2000; Mouffe 1996; Fraser 1992). Alternatively, there is a commonly voiced concern that
people simply do not want, and do not enjoy, deliberating. For example, Mutz (2006) argues that
reaching for a standard of deliberation will drive down democratic participation, undermining
rather than reinforcing democratic governance while even Mansbridge (often considered a
theorist of deliberative democracy) also articulated that deliberation and exposure to conflict can
serve as a deterrent to participation (Mansbridge 1983). This is not to overstate an
incompatibility between deliberative politics and greater inclusion and participation, but rather to
highlight that there are real reasons to suspect that sometime deliberative politics may have
mixed results if the objective is maximized participation.3
Deliberative democrats, meanwhile, present concerns that participation without
deliberation is the basis of a dysfunctional democracy. The multiple perspectives and reasoned
consideration demanded by deliberation as a standard are understood to encourage both the
democratic inclusion of the range of public voices and interests and good decision-making which
builds on a solid and well-examined base of information (Gastil 2008; Fishkin 2009; Jacobs, 3 On the interesting empirical question of actual observed participation in democratic events, Scheufele et al (2006), Jacobs et al (2009), and Neblo et al (2010) all present empirical findings providing evidence against these theoretical concerns.
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Cook, & Delli Carpini 2009). Deliberation thus comes to be seen as a way to reconcile
differences and come to recognize what members of the public have in common, encouraging
policies for the public good, rather than private interest (Habermas 1989; Gutmann and
Thompson 1996). Participation without establishing a framework for deliberation will turn
people off, as there are no assurances that their voice will be heard and their perspective
accounted for in any final decisions. In this perspective, deliberation is necessary to elicit
decisions in the common good while ensuring that a process includes all perspectives and
interests fairly.
Aligning empirical expectations
Empirical work on PG reflects these contrasting expectations from these theoretical
perspectives. The different priorities of deliberative and participatory democrats can be seen in
the range of outcomes researchers have chosen to evaluate. Take for example the outcome of
political efficacy, a commonly identified outcome from PG. Efficacy is generally understood to
be distinguished into internal and external efficacy: respectively one’s sense of personal
capabilities to understand and take political action vs. one’s expectation of actually having an
impact on political outcomes if action is taken. The choice of a researcher to focus on internal or
external efficacy as a salient outcome implicates a theoretical perspective. Ever since Pateman’s
seminal (1970) articulation of participatory democracy a primary outcome of participation is
understood to be its educative effect, participation as a form of training into the practice of
citizenship. In contrast, deliberation leads to an emphasis on external efficacy, whether and how
well an observer of a process believes that the input of “a person like themselves” could and did
have an impact on the final outcome.4
4 Knobloch and Gastil (2012) provide an engaging empirical example of this dynamic, when they identify very different mechanisms underpinning changes in internal and external efficacy in the general public.
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Similar relationships can be found across the other dominant outcomes of interests in the
study of PG. The focus on PG’s impact on civil society, particularly on social mobilization, is
largely reflective of participatory priorities.5 Even such fundamental democratic outcomes as
trust and accountability may be more aligned with one or the other tradition in how the concept
is operationalized: is trust established by standards of transparency and explanation of reasons by
government or by the public having direct access to decisions and decision-makers? Measures of
PG’s success in establishing more equitable spending or investment in true public goods may be
linked to either tradition, but the mechanisms through which researchers expect this outcome to
be generated (and thus the conditions necessary for it to come about) will be dependent on
whether success is understood be a result of broad-based meaningful participation, or successful
framing of a decision around collective needs. As a final point, democratic legitimacy as an
indicator of success cannot be clearly delineated as drawing on one or the other tradition, as each
offers a different standard of legitimacy inherent in the theory itself.
Framing a framework
I argue that, in fact, the distinct priorities and predictions that emerge from these different
theoretical perspectives can be exploited to make sense of the variation in the empirical work
existing on PG. I propose a framework for comparison that directly engages with this
distinction, building on theoretical insights and the full range of empirical findings to structure a
rigorous comparative evaluation of PG.
5 Some might even argue, using a deliberative standard, that a measure of a successful PG process is in fact whether it limits patterns of direct social mobilization and advocacy outside the controlled ‘balanced’ framework of a deliberative decision process (the prescription against public lobbying of courtroom juries is an ideal example of this dynamic).
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Community and Assembly: two models of participatory governance:
There are many ways that the implementation of PG may vary. In establishing this
framework I focus specifically on variation in the formal rules governing PG (rather than on its
framing, the area of policy concern, the origination of the initial impulse for participation, or the
dominant party providing political context, among others). Rules are established in response to a
range of demands and interests, and certainly not entirely on the basis of carefully articulated
normative ideals. Nevertheless, actual variation in PG can be seen to reflect different normative
compromises.
Considering the variation that exists within the PG institutions observable on the ground,
it is possible to differentiate PG institutions into two general clusters of approaches to public
engagement: one with a highly deliberative mode of communication and limited participant
selection with a fixed number of participants and random selection into the process (Assembly)
and another that prioritizes mass participation via self-selection and selective recruitment for
representativeness, with less of a narrow focus on deliberative communication (Community).6
As Fung (2012) explains, choices during design may be made to respond to particular democratic
deficits that reformers have identified. In this sense, priorities articulated by democratic theorists
are reflected or even amplified during design. Nevertheless, the empirical work around outcomes
from PG has not exploited this variation as well as it could have, in order to understand when
and why participatory governance broadly considered may seemingly have different effects in
the community. 6 The dimensions along which I am classifying approaches to PG are informed by Archon Fung’s (2006, 2012) approach to classifying on the diversity of approaches to public participation. He has identified three important dimensions of variation in institutional design: participant selection (including self-selection, selective recruitment, random selection), communication and decision mode (for example: expressive, aggregative, or deliberative), and extent of decision authority (reflecting Arnstein’s ladder). Given my definition of PG, I am only interested in the empowered end of his authority spectrum, and when considering the placement actual empowered instances of participation along the remaining two dimensions, tend to fall into these two clusters of traits that I identify as Assembly and Community models.
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These two general trajectories of institutional design reflect different priorities given to
the depth of participation versus the quality of deliberation and with distinct rules about selection
of participants and the structure of information-sharing and discussion. The Assembly approach
emphasizes high quality reasoned deliberation by a subset of the public, a statistically
representative group drawn from the general public who meet and become experts on an issue or
set of policy problems to come to a decision meant to stand in for an informed public. In
practice, this approach is exemplified by the British Columbia Citizen’s Assembly described
above. Alternatively, the Community approach emphasizes participatory and socially embedded
decision-making, and is usually open to any interested parties with quality of representation
determined by the number and descriptive representativeness of people who participated. The
Porto Alegre experience with Participatory Budgeting mentioned earlier can be held up as an
exemplar of this approach.
To further illustrate this distinction, consider the following hypothetical pair of examples:
A midsized municipality decides, for whatever reason, to implement participatory governance.
They are particularly interested in developing more community involvement in allocating
discretionary components of the municipal budget. Local government officials, perhaps with the
participation of civil society and community leaders look around at existing models of PG to use.
Based on existing case studies and developed expertise from organizational leaders in the field
(such as from the International Association of Public Participation, National Coalition for
Dialogue and Deliberation, or the practitioner networks supported by Involve), they identify two
possible approaches:
1. (Assembly): Organizers are committed to maintaining a broad representation of the
priorities of the general public and to allowing for a transparent and deliberate
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consideration of challenges and possible solutions. The city decides to convene a
representative sample of the public, which draws together a stratified random sample of
people from across the city for several months of repeated meetings, structured learning
from experts and civil society organizations, and moderated discussion ultimately
producing a set of budget priorities and allocations sent to the city administration for
implementation.
2. (Community): Organizers are committed to broad inclusion of the interested public and
building on familiar meeting structures of public participation. The city decides to have
an open process whereby anyone is invited to a series of accessible neighborhood-based
meetings where issues and problems are articulated, priorities formed, and decisions on
budget allocations made, and aggregated at the municipal level through elected delegates
to a city-wide body.
The final choice to implement of either of these models will reflect the different priorities
and institutional resources, as well as the preferences, of the dominant local advocates for civic
innovation in combination with the interests of the politicians and/or officials who have decided
to implement participatory reforms. While implementation along either approach is part of a
common trend toward participatory governance, often carried by the same justifications and
declared motivations, the particular design choice will likely generate differences in impact
depending on the approach. This is where renewing connections between practices of
participatory governance and democratic theory can become helpful. While in practice,
participatory governance innovations draw on both normative traditions, the different strength of
each tradition in the process as implemented can be a guide to designate likely outcomes, helping
to build a framework to guide comparative work. While insights from democratic theory can
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help generate well-reasoned complex predictions, a detailed empirical understanding of the
mechanisms through which different models of PG have the effects that they do (or do not!) can
help to clarify how these ideal models of democracy play out in fact. A comparative analysis of
PG highlights how the deliberative and participatory ideals, in fact operate simultaneously in our
political practices. Rather than representing a choice to be made between ideal visions of
democracy, recognizing the tensions between participatory and deliberative democracy can
actually help to understand why subtle differences in the design of PG institutions may have
dramatic effects on the outcomes.
Observable implications
Building on these contrasting expectations from participatory and deliberative theory, in
combination with research elsewhere in political behavior and communication, it is possible to
outline a set of expectations for empirical implications. Recognizing the importance of
seemingly minor choices about the process and conditions of implementation can help to
generate empirical expectations which can incorporate a diversity of possible outcomes, even
from “successfully” implemented PG processes. At least in part, this can help to explain the
ambivalence of some of the empirical record on PG.
In general terms, the Community model (when implemented effectively and in good
faith) can be expected to increase perceptions of internal political efficacy, levels of community
mobilization and density of civil society networks, accountability, and (assuming equitable
representation and support during the process) may result in more equitable or pro-poor policy
outcomes. On the other hand, under ideal conditions the Assembly model may be broadly
expected to generate increased perceptions of external efficacy, greater trust in government, and
(depending on the information and framing available in deliberations) result in more equitable
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community-oriented policy outcomes. Obviously, many of these outcomes are themselves
related, and this is an oversimplified representation of outcomes as they may be actually
observed. For example, if new information does not reveal untrustworthy behavior by
government, greater accountability may in turn generate more trust, or implementation of more
equitable policies may in turn generate stronger senses of external political efficacy. Thus,
actual testing of these claims as hypotheses through observation of distinct outcomes from either
approach will be complex and difficult using a purely observational statistical approach.
Table 1: Participatory governance reform: ideal outcomes and their conditions
Community Assembly
Direct outcomes increased internal efficacy increased public mobilization denser civil society greater accountability more equitable policies
increased external efficacy greater trust in government more equitable policies
Conditions broad early outreach well-managed inclusive process buy-in from government officials
includes adequate information for good decision-making
wide publicity during and especially after process, including
accurate and detailed information on process and participants
deliberation facilitation activates collective preferences
full information on all community needs included
Either approach is also dependent on government officials acting in good faith and implementing decisions generated by the public through PG. Without real commitment from government the process does not meet the core conceptual standards of PG and may be understood at best as a process of consultation and at worst cooptation and demobilization.
In addition to these broadly distinct causal arcs, approaching PG by distinguishing
Community and Assembly models also highlights different conditions necessary for participatory
reforms to have the anticipated positive democratic impact. To have a broad impact in the
community, Assembly approaches to PG will be highly dependent on publicity, specifically
publicity toward the end of the process and during implementation of any decisions and publicity
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that communicates a relatively nuanced level of reporting on the composition of the assembly
and the deliberative process it followed. Participants must be understood by the rest of the
general public to be “people like me” and the inclusion and consideration of a range of
perspectives must be clearly communicated. If better or more equitable decisions result from the
assembly, more positive results may eventually be seen, but may not be understood to be directly
attributed to the process itself. Community approaches have their own conditions for impact:
publicity (in the form of outreach into the process) is critically important in the early stages of
the process in order to maximize participation and with discussion and decision within the
process effectively open to all participants.
Table 1 above outlines these effects and conditions for each model. It can be seen that
the more participatory Community model is in fact dependent on a degree of deliberation as a
condition for successful impact, while the Assembly model is dependent on a participatory
principles of inclusion. In this way, examining the dynamics of democratic innovation as it plays
out on the ground can in fact help temper the apparent tensions between participatory and
deliberative democracy.
Conclusion
The direct engagement with variation in the implementation of PG reforms is critically
important to building a basis of evidence about how participatory governance matters. While
numerous descriptive case studies exist, systematic comparative research on PG institutions,
especially their outcomes, is still an emerging field of study. Initial research on participatory
governance innovations focused on explanations of why PG emerged in specific cases,
typologies of innovations (Smith 2009; Fung 2006), and, later, describing and explaining
variation in the successful implementation of similar processes within a country (McNulty 2011;
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Wampler 2007). Scholarship is now turning to the question of evaluating impact, but has lacked
a strong framework with which to understand divergent outcomes and diverse models while
maintaining a focus on the common class of participatory governance reforms
This examination of the impacts of these different models will also help to connect the
discussions of theorists of participatory and deliberative democracy to on the ground democratic
experiments. While to some extent distinctions between deliberative and participatory ideals
have been set aside in the course of practical implementation, theorists have repeatedly outlined
tensions between the normative priorities of deliberative and participatory democrats. Without
arguing that one approach is universally ‘better’ than the other, by disaggregating PG this project
will allow for an improved understanding of the impact of these philosophical dilemmas on the
political opportunities and lives of people in actually existing democracies. The existence of a
debate between participatory and deliberative democrats, and the implications for divergent
design priorities in application should not be taken to mean that these choices are all mutually
exclusive. Rather, recognizing these distinct theoretical roots helps to clarify the complexity of
the choices of design and implementation, and supports a more nuanced understanding of what
these choices may mean for democratic outcomes.
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